Posts Tagged UFO

So, when Schwartz postulated that he and Galanos were abducted by alien chiropractors, he wasn’t far off. 😉

The Interstellar Starfighter (6979-1) is one of my favorite LEGO spaceships. It looks like an alien version of the Starship Enterprise, and boy does it photograph well. It’s got some great features, too, like the detachable craft in the back that holds on to the main ship with magnets; a cool cockpit with two of the fantastic UFO aliens at the helm; a battery-powered system of light-up red tubes and a creepy noise that sounds like the mysterious ship’s powerful engines at work; and those wonderful neon green parts that always look like they’re glowing – that’s not just a lighting trick. It’s also huge, especially at a time when LEGO vehicles tended to skew smaller than they do now. I know some people get down on UFO because of the large, printed saucer pieces that weren’t of much use in anything else, but I maintain that it is one of LEGO’s best-designed themes. It’s one of my favorites at least, which is probably why I tracked down most of the sets in recent years!

This is the first time I revealed the name of the cloaked alien – Megalos. His brother, Thorsos, was identified way back in “Date Night (Part 19),” which also explained his obsession with Schwartz. You can see more of their sibling rivalry in “The Bad Side of Town (Part 11).”

I’ve been on my usual slight summer hiatus, obviously, partially due to being busy and partially due to the complexity of planning and shooting the space scenes in this part of the story. (I’m enjoying the way they’ve come out so far…) Summer is so fleeting, especially when you’re seemingly the lone guy in the region that loves extreme heat and humidity. I’ve been making an effort to walk outside and go swimming as much as possible. I become miserable when the long, long months of cold weather begin, but at least they afford me more time to do comics. 🙂

First of all, don’t get too excited. Just as it’s been the last few years, I don’t have the time to create this comic at the rate I did almost a decade (!) ago. What I did realize is that I miss having the comic in my life, and I miss sharing it with the people who enjoy it. (Some still pine for it, which was a huge factor in creating today’s strip. I couldn’t leave the Gemini twins hanging in mortal peril much longer, either, could I?) I would also love to one day, MAYBE, actually wrap up a storyline or two. It would be nice to complete a new comic once in awhile, maybe once every couple of weeks, maybe once a month, who knows? Let’s just see what happens.

In the meantime, I’ve worked hard on my fiction writing and managed to sell a few short stories. One of them actually stars Commander Schwartz himself, and it’s the prose version of “Stuck On Mars.” If you’d like to read it (and many other fine stories), it can be found on Amazon in “Jouth Anthology: The Fantastic Flying Saucer Stories” RIGHT HERE.

And that’s the end of the overall “The Search” arc, a story that began a whopping five years ago! Next up is a tale that I had a hell of a fun time shooting. We’re also perilously close to the 500th comic…

Valkyrie and Schwartz’s date in Scotland took an unexpected turn when it evolved into a smackdown between Nessie and a UFO, filmed by the DACTA news agency and viewed across the cosmos. It’s a long story. But you can read it starting here: http://spacethecomic.com/?p=465